As we creep towards all things Copenhagen and global warming/climate change, I offer this most illuminating debate from December 1st in Toronto…
Skeptics win global warming debate
Late returns from the Munk Debate adding 50 more ballots received indicate the skeptics did even better than first thought. Lomborg and Lawson in fact achieved an eight-point shift in the audience’s view and thus a 16-point swing in their favour. The final vote tally was 53% for the warmists, 47% for the skeptics, as opposed to 61% for the warmists (May and Monbiott) and 39% for the skeptics at the start.
If I was there debating (and I would be significantly short on the intellectual ammunition), I would have made the following point.
I would be debating in protest. Protest because of the one person not in attendance at the debate. Whenever warmists debate the impending doom that is climate change, they NEVER speak of the one person who is most knowledgeable about why warming is happening and when and if it may end.
No, I’m not talking about Al Gore. trying to get him to debate his signature issue is an exercise in futility.
That person is The Sun, a name that should be synonymous with the term “warming”.
Two years ago, I cited Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, who discovered that because of the obscene use of SUVs and irresponsible burning of fossil fuels on the planet Mars, her polar icecaps were melting as well.
Being the intellectual lightweight I am, I tried using simple logic.
Seeing how Mars is further away from The Sun than the planet Earth, and her icecaps were melting as well, could it be (however remote the chance since we KNOW that humans are causing warming here) that The Sun could be responsible for warming, and until the environmental movement can find a way to not only conclusively blame The Sun, issue an appropriate punishment, demand restitution, and get it to agree and pay up, this whole global warming argument is flawed.
As we obviously, despite the vanity of humans, cannot make The Sun do anything we want it do, is it fair to conclude we couldn’t do anything about the climate even if we wanted to? We’re not just dealing with the vanity of humans but also the narcissism of environmentalists who are so enamoured in their own self-importance and the hubris of not being proven wrong.
The buck stops with The Sun. If environmentalists have the guts to lay blame where it’s due, fine. If they can assure us that The Sun’s actions won’t be a benefit down the road, fine.
But to leave The Sun totally out of their equations is laughable.
